MEMS sensor fusion simplified by toolkit

PORTLAND, Ore.—With micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) being built into nearly every new consumer device—from smartphones to power-tools—many design engineers are facing a steep learning curve when crafting the necessary sensor-fusion algorithms for sophisticated motion processing.

To the rescue is Movea's SmartFusion Studio, announced today at Mobile World Congress 2013, which aims to make every engineer an instant-expert in sensor-fusion for motion processing in applications including pedestrian navigation, gesture recognition, gaming, activity monitoring and contextual awareness.

"SmartFusion Studio reduces the time and cost associated with developing, testing, and deploying motion-based applications," said Sam Guilaumé, CEO of Movea. "Designers can now quickly and accurately calibrate and validate sensor-data integration algorithms."

Smart apps today require sensor fusion, in order to determine the context in which the user is operating their device. Smartphones, for instance, today have accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers, barometric pressure, temperature and proximity sensors, the data streams from which need to be fused to determine the orientation, location and dynamic motion signature—such as "shake to undo"—of a device. Also an increasing number of apps are using the state of the local environment—such as whether the user is at home, work, walking or driving—in order to provide context aware functions.

All these determinations, however, involve complex algorithms on which many engineers need to bone-up in order to succeed. SmartFusion Studio is said to give even novice engineers turnkey access to such context awareness.

SmartFusion Studio is based on Movea's already popular MotionCore library of sensor-fusion algorithms, but simplifies their implementation with turnkey calibration and validation tools for quickly recording sensor data and rapid debugging using fill-in-the-blank parameter testing and visualization tools, according to Movea. And, later in 2013, Movea promises to simplify the design effort further by adding drag-and-drop signal processing data-flow builders to SmartFusion Studio for chaining together data-fusion algorithms into sophisticated multifaceted motion-processing applications.Related stories: